Obama’s year in office: no more great expectations

A year ago the world watched Barack Obama's historic inauguration as US president. At the time the buzzword was “hope”. Today it has changed to “broken promises” and “lost expectations”.

On January 20, 2009, Capitol Hill was filled with crowds cheering for the newly elected president. But shortly after his inauguration people started taking to the streets for different reasons – demanding the promised closure of the Guantanamo Bay and protesting against healthcare reform and treatment of immigrants.

“America is going broke. We've given trillions of dollars for Wall Street, trillions of dollars for war. Meanwhile, you've got all these people out of work, people losing their homes, their jobs, their retirement security. I mean, that's not what America is supposed to be about,” says US Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

“It was extremely disappointing,” she said. “Maybe we had irrationally high hopes, but I remember sitting in that inauguration thinking that this was going to be a year of fantastic change. And now I think that this is not the change that I had hoped for, that I had voted for.”

Since becoming president, Obama has not delivered on his promises to get US troops back home. On the contrary, he has expanded the war in Afghanistan. And it is not only the matter of American soldiers fighting on foreign soil, but also that of spending huge amounts of money, especially during an economic crisis.

“I think it's an absolute moral outrage that he takes a stand on whether to spend money rather than whether to cover people with healthcare when he is funding outrageous foreign occupations to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year,” believes author and political activist David Swanson.

“The previous administration tried to rule the world. It didn’t pay attention to the United Nations, to international law, to other countries. And Obama tries to do that. If you look at Russian-American relations, they improved. A year ago everybody talked about a new Cold War, nobody talks about this now.”

Former Member of the European Parliament Giulietto Chiesa sees no significant achievements from Obama when it comes to US foreign policy and tackling terrorism – be it the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Guantanamo Bay.

“I don’t see any changes, Obama is a wonderful speaker, but they are only speeches. When it comes to concrete deals, nothing has changed,” Chiesa told RT. “The problem is that Obama seems incapable of facing the pressure.”

Government and business consultant Christoph Horstel has noted some positive changes in the new administration’s foreign policy but says they are not enough:

“Obama is more open. He is talking directly to Iran without preconditions – that’s something new. But it hasn’t led to much, unfortunately. Military pressure on Iran is there. We are seeing a shift of troops literally from Iraq to Afghanistan. So the troop presence has not changed much in the last year.”